Well, I thought that I’d talk about how nostalgia is different for everyone. This was something I ended up thinking about in mid-November last year after stumbling across Kate Steinberg’s comedy sketches on Youtube.
Most of these sketches are themed around “2000s nostalgia” but, as someone in my mid-thirties, I was surprised at how these videos were both highly evocative of growing up in that era – yet also a world apart from my own memories of that decade. It was uncanny. And, yes, a lot of this is probably to do with the fact that I was a different person in a different place.
For example, I grew up in southern England. The world of the cynical sitcom “The Inbetweeners” (2008-10) is probably closer in atmosphere and mood to the version of the 2000s that I remember, but even that isn’t an exact match. I mean, when I created a stylised art series very loosely-based on my memories of the early-mid 2000s, called “2004-Land“, it quickly turned into as much of a cynical piece of satire as anything nostalgic.
Although it took me a while to get over the bittersweet emotions that all of this evoked in me – feelings of having “missed out” on much better versions of the 2000s, paired with familiar reassurance about the “pre-smartphone” culture of the time – it also reminded me that everyone has their own unique nostalgia. Two people can have experienced the same decade, but have totally different emotions, media, memories etc… associated with it.
Like, yes, there will be a few things in common between everyone’s nostalgia – for example, whilst I had a Nokia 1100 mobile phone during the mid-2000s, I can still remember cooler people than me using flip-phones.
Plus, it was pretty much impossible not to love either the song “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence and/or the theme tune to “Pirates Of The Caribbean” back in 2003 either.
Even so, if you look at someone else’s nostalgia for any given time, then there will be differences. Nostalgia is one of those weird things – it can bring everyone of a certain age together, but it can also divide at the same time.
Not to mention that, as fun as nostalgia can be, it’s rarely very accurate either. It’s often highly edited, summarised and/or rose-tinted. Case in point, back in mid-November last year, I found myself in a gloomy mood and thinking things like “November 2022 was way better than this year“. Then, of course, I looked at my journals from the tine and realised that – whilst I played a ton of cool computer games back then – I still had bad moods and stressful days. It wasn’t some “perfect” thing. I’d just forgotten the bad parts.
And, of course, when I looked at my journals from the late 2000s earlier last year – after some very rose-tinted nostalgia – it was almost like reading a horror novel! The sheer amount of angst, anger, misery etc… in those old journals was genuinely unsettling. And it gave me a renewed appreciation for the present day. Seriously, when I first began feeling nostalgic about the 2000s during the mid-late 2010s, it really caught me by surprise because a lot of my actual memories of the decade were that it was a “crappy” decade.
So, yes, nostalgia is a weird thing. Not only is it a drastically upgraded version of the past, but it’s also one of those emotions that is common to virtually everyone, yet also at least subtly different for everyone at the same time.
——————–
Anyway, I hope that this was interesting